think I've found a price plan for the Hero that means I won't be forced to turn to prostituting myself next year.

I really wanted N1 on contract but it's going to be exclusive to Vodafone initially and they haven't even given the release date yet. Not only that but because the phone will be hugely popular, they will most likely rip you off with £30-35 on 24 month contract... so I decided buy because I want it now and I think there's a good chance that it will end up cheaper to buy than to have on contract.

HTC are generally pretty slow at updating the older phones. There is a healthy community of people building custom ROM's for them though - I had a G1 before I bought the Desire and it was quite happily running Android 2.0... Here is a good place to start.

You should probably also be aware that the hardware in the Hero is rather old and slow compared to the current generation of phones...